Mission Impossible

Share

Mission Impossible

__Esther Dyson tried to make ICANN - the fledgling international agency charged with managing the global domain name system - into a model of frictionless governance. Guess what happened. __

The auditorium of the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Center sits inside a sleek, aluminum-clad complex rising from the industrial docklands of this working-class port city on Tokyo Bay. The surrounding neighborhood is a planned development built on landfill, with shopping malls, modern hotel towers, an art museum, and an amusement park, where a giant Ferris wheel dominates the landscape and the screams from roller-coaster riders enliven the gritty landscape. Amid this incongruous mix of old and new, Esther Dyson, a digital age guru, leans her elbow on a chair and recites a few lines from an 85-year-old poem. "And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions ..."

There's been a break in the proceedings of the quarterly board meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (held in June), and Dyson, the interim chair, is using the time to offer up a slice of T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It's a response to her colleagues' decision to expand the number of top-level domains in the commercial sector beyond the familiar .com, .net, and .org. The outcome of the vote, cast minutes earlier, was good news, but the plan was short on details - like how many TLDs would be tested, and when. Dyson's recourse to the lyrical, then, was clearly also satirical - "The decision leaves too much to be decided later," she would tell a knot of reporters - but still, there was an air of relief about her. It had been a long time since she'd seen any forward momentum at all. With luck, this baby step - in essence, a decision to make a decision - would buttress ICANN's still-fragile legitimacy and save it from the demise many critics were predicting.

ICANN was created two years ago as an unprecedented experiment in global self-governance. Based in Marina del Rey, California, the nonprofit corporation was charged with managing the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which had been created, funded, and, until then, supervised by the US government.

Global resources like this one are usually managed by international treaty organizations that award every member country one vote. The telephone system, for example, is governed by the International Telecommunication Union. But this model often leads to decades-long debate and negotiation, such as the never-ending impasse over international dialing rates. The thinking behind ICANN was that Internet time doesn't allow for such international sclerosis; what was needed was a new kind of regulatory body, one that could make important changes in a hurry.

__"Government is too slow to keep up with the digital environment," said Ira Magaziner, before handing ICANN the very heart of the Internet. __

"Government is too slow to keep up with the digital environment," said Clinton administration Internet czar Ira Magaziner in 1998 of ICANN's imminent creation.

Simply put, the DNS is the Internet's phone book. ICANN sets the rules for doling out the numbered IP addresses in that book (like 204.62.131.44); assigning numbers to plain word addresses (like wired.com); and deciding whether (and which) new suffixes might be added to the directory. ICANN also sets rules for arbitrating disputes over domain ownership, which are designed to keep ownership squabbles out of the courts. Needless to say, there are billions of dollars at stake - a single domain, business.com, changed hands for $7.5 million last fall. Adding just one TLD - .store, for example - could instantly create vast new swaths of domain real estate and simultaneously deflate the value of the biggest asset some Net companies now own.

What's more, the US government plans, on an undetermined date, to hand over control of the root servers - the 13 computers (10 in the United States, 2 in Europe, 1 in Japan) that contain authorized copies of the master directory used to route Net traffic. When that happens, ICANN's control of the DNS will mean deciding how traffic gets from point A to point B. The potential commercial and political power that goes along with such control is staggering.

"The DNS is the very heart of the Internet, the Archimedean point on which this vast global network balances," says David Post, an associate professor at Temple University Law School and a cofounder of the public interest group ICANNWatch (www.icannwatch.org). "ICANN has an immense amount of power over who gets in and who gets out. It is a kind of electronic life and death. If you have the power to make somebody disappear, you can get them to act in ways that they might not otherwise act."

That sounds drastic, but Post does have a point. In a worst-case scenario, an ICANN unhappy with the behavior of particular Web sites - justified or not - has the power to rewrite the rules of domain name ownership as it sees fit.

For all of its power and potential to ruin the status quo, ICANN had a list of enemies from the day it was founded - most notably, Network Solutions Inc., the company granted a monopoly on domain registration via a 1993 federal government contract. With so much at stake, ICANN desperately needed leaders with stature who could deflect attacks from such vested interests. Dyson - smart, media-savvy, and widely recognized as an expert writer and speaker on the Internet - fit the bill, and with the tacit approval of the Clinton administration, she and eight others were tapped as ICANN's initial board of directors. Her peers selected Dyson as their chair at their very first meeting.

It wasn't a role an economic libertarian like Dyson could be wholly comfortable with. She had always espoused free market solutions to any problem; despite its private sector origins, ICANN is still essentially a regulatory body setting limits on the market. And yet, motivated by a sense of public duty and a concern for the Net's future, Dyson accepted a position that would often bring her into conflict with her own beliefs.

Because they have a chance to draft new rules of the road, the nine original ICANN board members - who are considered "interim" directors - have been compared by some romantics to the American founding fathers. Thanks to prodding by governments around the world, and particularly the European Union, Magaziner's task force decreed that these founders would have a slightly more multicultural look than those who attended the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The original ICANN board consists of four Americans, three Europeans, and one representative from Japan and Australia. Along with Dyson, there's former Radcliffe College president Linda Wilson, marketing executive Frank Fitzsimmons, Akamai CEO George Conrades, Dutch telephone executive Hans Kraaijenbrink, French technology executive Géraldine Capdeboscq, Australian telecom expert Greg Crews, Japanese academic Jun Murai, and Spanish consultant Eugenio Triana. They all resist grandiose analogies about their clout, insisting repeatedly that their mandate is highly constrained and merely technical. "ICANN's powers are very limited," was Dyson's characteristic response when asked at a public Q&A in March whether the corporation could someday evolve into a powerful "government of the Internet."

Why downplay ICANN's role? In part, it's an attempt to allay the very real fear in the Internet community that the corporation will abuse its power. But emphasizing its limited jurisdiction is also an attempt to help divert media attention. From day one, the spotlight on ICANN has effectively paralyzed the board. Case in point: a meeting in Cairo, three months before the Yokohama gathering. So many critics showed up to attack the main item on the agenda - coming up with a procedure to elect permanent board members in place of the nine interim directors - that the board was forced to junk its plan after several days of debate and devise a half-baked compromise.

"There's one joke we have on the board all the time," says Jonathan Cohen, an intellectual property attorney and one of nine additional directors who joined the ICANN board in late October 1999. "We might as well do what we think is right, because no matter what we do we're going to get criticized."

If no one's laughing it's because the board has been unable to reach even an internal consensus on what is right. While the Net continues to grow exponentially, straining the current DNS setup, ICANN has fallen into a quagmire that has critics fearing the great experiment is about to unravel. Among the detractors is Dave Farber, a University of Pennsylvania engineering professor and Internet pioneer who spent the past year advising the FCC on Net issues. Farber, who along with Dyson was an early board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, "There's only one chance to get this right. If it doesn't work, the governments will take over."

__While the Net continues to grow exponentially, ICANN has fallen into a quagmire that critics fear will cause the great experiment to unravel. __

If that sounds like merely replacing one form of hopelessness with another, it's not. Government takeover wouldn't just mean a continuation of dysfunction; it could also mean the emergence of electronic border guards. Today, the packets of data traveling across the Internet are not constrained by national borders. But without an internationally recognized authority like ICANN, the temptation to erect barriers - for reasons of, say, censorship or taxation - might be too strong to resist. And this would be the end of the global Internet as we know it.

Should that happen, Dyson - who will step down at the annual ICANN meeting in November - won't be around to witness it. Although her departure comes a year later than originally planned, Dyson acknowledges that almost everything about ICANN remains in question. That, she says, is a by-product of the limits she felt as an appointee - rather than an elected official - coupled with the inherent limits ICANN's "bottom up" management charter places on its board. "My job at ICANN was not to make it do what I wanted it to do - it was about trying to foster consensus," she says. "I'd much rather go out and do something that I want and let the market decide."

"I'm looking forward to the day when I can be a loyal critic of ICANN outside of ICANN," she told me at one point during conversations that spanned several months. "I really want to get on with the rest of my life."

The day I arrived in Cairo, I went to see Dyson speak at an African Internet conference, held near the Cairo Sheraton, where the ICANN meetings would take place. When I found her in a packed hallway outside a hotel ballroom shortly before her speech, she was frantic. "I've got no time to talk," she said abruptly, scurrying into the room. The scene set the tone for the next several days.

Lobbyists of all stripes had made the trek to the ICANN quarterly meeting, to observe, network, and, most important, ensure the election of a board that would be sympathetic to their needs. There were representatives from Network Solutions, aka NSI, which, in the midst of the meeting, would be acquired by VeriSign in a $20 billion deal; country-code administrators for top-level domains like .jp (Japan) or .tv (Tuvalu); companies like Register.com that resell domains; Internet service providers; trademark holders and their lawyers (because the bulk of domain ownership disputes in existing TLDs involve commercial trademarks, the folks who own Coca-Cola and McDonald's have a big stake in the issue of TLD expansion); and public interest groups concerned that commercial voices hold too much sway on the process.

For a nongovernmental organization, ICANN looked an awful lot like government in action - or inaction. Many special interest groups with diverging agendas were on hand; no one was willing to budge; and lots of people were completely confused about the issue under discussion. "The elections," AT&T lobbyist Marilyn Cade said during one meeting, "are hard to explain, even to people who are involved."

The confusion was rooted in ICANN's byzantine bylaws, which set up a bifurcated selection process. The nine original directors were chosen by the late Jon Postel, the organization's architect, after canvassing the Internet's academic, technical, and corporate communities for suggestions. The guidepost for his choices was the "White Paper" - a government policy statement drafted by Magaziner's task force in the summer of 1998 - that formally called for the privatization of the domain name system and included a call for greater public participation in DNS management.

Postel dictated that the nine new directors would serve on an interim basis for one year, and then be replaced through an election held in the Internet community "at large." Another nine directors would be elected by a set of narrowly defined constituency groups, bringing the total number of seats on the board to 18. But it was unclear who constituted the at-large community electing the replacements for the interim directors. Was it anyone who could send an email? Anyone who owned a domain? Postel's plan didn't specify.

In October 1999, the original board - trying to measure up to the White Paper's standard, and hoping to make it difficult for any given special interest to stack the electorate - adopted the plan for an indirect election. Individuals who registered as at-large members at the ICANN site could cast electronic ballots for candidates for an 18-member At-Large Council - something akin to the Electoral College. The Council would then hold a second, limited vote, choosing nine from their group for the board seats.

The board was supposed to ratify this complex scheme in Cairo. But what was expected to be a pro forma period for public comment turned into a prolonged shouting match. Two days before the meeting, a pair of US civil liberties groups - Common Cause, the grassroots citizens' lobby, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit focused on protecting free speech and privacy rights, released a report criticizing the indirect elections and calling for a direct vote. Common Cause president Scott Harshbarger and his counterpart, CDT executive director Jerry Berman, whom Dyson describes as "an old friend," showed up in Cairo to denounce the two-step indirect election in favor of a more direct approach. "Let's be accountable; let's let people vote for members of the board," Berman said. "Let's have democracy."

Dyson, whose involvement with the EFF gives her a well-established track record as a civil libertarian, should have been sympathetic to this argument. But not on this day. As Berman's comment turned into a rambling filibuster, she spun her hand in a "get on with it" motion, and then tried to cut him off with a curt "thank you." Berman deflected this attempt. "One last point!" he countered, plunging toward his conclusion.

__Overrun with special interest groups hoping to affect the election process, the public comment period turned into a prolonged shouting match. __

Next came an open-mike session. The line stretched to 20, then 25, then 30 people. Among the speakers who criticized the procedures: AT&T's Marilyn Cade; European Union representative Christopher Wilkinson; Jamie Love from Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology; the Carter Center's Charles Costello; CDT's Alan Davidson; and Harold Feld, a DC-area lawyer representing a group calling itself the Domain Name Rights Coalition.

Two days earlier, Dyson had assured a roomful of Africans at the nearby conference, "We're not here to tell you how the Internet should be governed. We're here to collect your opinions." But now, with the line of commentators trailing to the back of the room, the sheer volume of opinion wore down her patience: "Let me please ask all of you, board members included, to be quicker!" Dyson said, instituting a one-minute rule. Speaker after speaker proceeded to ignore the clock - all of them calling for a direct election.

The board should have seen it coming. For months, conspiracy theorists had been criticizing the election scheme as an attempt to diminish public influence and increase ICANN's power. "Whoever controls the DNS will be subject to immense pressure to stray far beyond any limited technical functions," ICANNWatch groused on its Web site. "The domain name system looks like the one place where enforceable global Internet policy can be promulgated without the messy enforcement and jurisdictional problems that bedevil ordinary lawmaking exercises."

And yet, the negative comments seemed to catch the board off-guard. By the time the speakers had finished, Hans Kraaijenbrink was seething. "I would like to reiterate," he said, red-faced and speaking louder with each sentence, "and maybe we should carve it in stone. The mission of ICANN is the technical coordination of certain essential parameters for the Internet names and addresses. Nothing more! And nothing less!" Not only was the report coming at "one minute to midnight," he added, "but it is bringing us back to square one, and I for one do not want to go back to square one."

In the old days, there was no need for ICANN because there was Jon Postel. Before his death in October 1998, Postel's official title was Director of the Computer Networks Division at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey. Unofficially, he was the benevolent despot of the DNS, a role he had played for nearly 30 years as head of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Under a contract with the federal government, IANA managed the 13 root servers, dispensed country codes to nations Postel judged technically competent, and made sure that the DNS held together. (NSI handled registration for .com, .net, and .org domains under a separate federal contract.)

By the mid-'90s, the massive commercialization of the Net had put DNS management beyond the power of one man. Knowing his reign was coming to an end, Postel wanted to set the rules for his successor. "Jon had very strong parental feelings about the DNS. He didn't want anyone to fuck things up," recalls Joe Sims, a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Jones Day Reavis Pogue who was hired by Postel in 1998 to help craft a plan. "But he recognized there needed to be a better structure."

Organizing a successor to IANA proved difficult. In late 1996, with the NSI monopoly set to expire in two years, Postel, supported by many of his peers in the Internet engineering community, circulated a plan to create a global Net management group based in Geneva. The private organization would assume the Commerce Department's authority over the services provided by IANA and NSI, add as many as 150 new generic TLDs, and open up competition in the registry service. The very suggestion caused all hell to break loose.

NSI lobbyists whispered to US representatives and senators that the Internet was being stolen by foreigners; Congress, in turn, proceeded to rail against the plan. "American taxpayers, companies, and government built the Internet," thundered Representative Charles Pickering (R-Mississippi), acting chair of the House Science Subcommittee on Basic Research, in the fall of 1997. "This is something uniquely American." Meanwhile, across town, Eugene Kashpureff, a renegade engineer determined to break NSI's monopoly, made international headlines when he hijacked the entire DNS by rerouting traffic to a new registry called AlterNIC and fleeing to Toronto. Kashpureff was extradited and jailed for his stunt.

"When I think of the last four years, it's been like a Dickens novel," Internet Society president Don Heath observed last spring. "There have been death threats. There have been prison sentences, and outrageous testimony before Congress."

While Postel struggled, Magaziner tried to come up with an official US government solution. After spearheading President Clinton's failed national health care initiative, Magaziner took the helm of an interagency task force designed to craft federal policies on ecommerce, privacy rights, and, most important, domain name management. Beginning in 1996, the task force began a series of fact-finding meetings with engineers, business executives, public interest groups, foreign governments, and academics, trying to arrive at a consensus on private DNS management.

In January 1998, the Commerce Department, under Magaziner's guidance, proposed a new set of rules that would make private Internet management a reality. Based on discussions with Postel and many of the people working with him, the proposal, called the "Green Paper," looked an awful lot like Postel's plan. It recommended replacing IANA with a private corporation run by a 14-member board of directors (plus a CEO who would also have a seat on the board). The overarching goal would be to maintain Internet stability, but this organization would also foster competition in the registration business. All decisions were to be made by consensus of the community - broadly defined as Internet "stakeholders." The one major point unique to the Green Paper was the suggestion that half of the 14 directors would represent "Internet users," aka the general public.

__"It's been like a Dickens novel. There have been death threats. There have been prison sentences, and outrageous testimony before Congress." __

Because it lacked specifics, the plan was as unpopular as Postel's proposal. Europeans considered it biased toward the US. Trademark lawyers cried foul. The engineers at the Internet Council of Registrars, who had been involved with Postel's effort, called it a step backward. So Magaziner went back to work, and six months later emerged with a retooled version - the White Paper - that would become the official Commerce Department policy.

Knowing that the White Paper would repeat the Green Paper's call for a private successor to IANA - referred to as "newco" - Postel and Sims were already well into drafting corporate bylaws and searching for board members when it was released. By October, the Commerce Department had designated ICANN as its successor. But Magaziner remained wedded to the notion that half the board would represent the public.

"He produced this notion that we've been trying to fix ever since," Sims says, adding that Postel believed generally that Net experts should govern ICANN's operations. "Jon's view was that the users of the Internet should have a voice, but that they shouldn't have a controlling voice. Ira did great things for the Internet by convincing the rest of the world that a private company could accomplish the goal. But he was really a pretty lousy politician. Many of the people he was talking to were nuts!"

"Democracy always seems less efficient in the short run," Magaziner says of his continued push for the participation of ICANN's critics. "But we think in the long run it was the only way to achieve legitimacy."

The net result: As of this fall, ICANN still lacked a final plan for selecting half its board. The resolution that came out of the Cairo meetings was, once again, little more than a decision to make a decision. People who registered as at-large members on the ICANN Web site before July 2000 would be eligible to vote in the September elections for five regional at-large directors. Post-election, ICANN would conduct a study of the makeup of the entire at-large membership, the process, and the election results before making a final decision about how the remaining four directors should be replaced.

Dyson first heard about ICANN in July 1998, when she ran into Roger Cochetti at an Aspen Institute conference. Cochetti, a former Carter administration official and public policy expert at IBM, was helping Postel build a list of potential board members for what would eventually become ICANN. Hypothetically, Cochetti said to Dyson, if someone were to ask her to join the board of a nonprofit corporation designed to assume management of the domain name system, would she be interested? Sure, probably, Dyson replied.

Ironically, it was her lack of involvement up to then that propelled Dyson's candidacy. Sims and Postel had come up with a rule: Find people who weren't active in the wars that had raged over the Green and White papers. "For my sins, I was appointed to ICANN," Dyson now jokes. "If I'd been more involved, I wouldn't have been appointed!"

Dyson clearly had other pluses. For one thing, she's an American - for domestic political reasons, Sims and Postel wanted at least half the board to come from the US. She had served on corporate boards, including those of Eastern European and Russian companies, and spoke several languages. On top of all that, she had a high profile in the Internet industry - for her books, her newsletter, and her yearly intellectual powwow, PC Forum - and experience on the board of a nonprofit (the EFF). One of the few prominent women in the tech world in the '80s and early '90s, Dyson also comes from a high-profile family - her father, Freeman, is a world-renowned astrophysicist and her brother is author George Dyson, whose Darwin Among the Machines is widely considered the definitive intellectual history of the technology revolution.

The ICANN board met for the first time in October 1998, only weeks after Postel's unexpected death following heart surgery. There was an air of crisis, and a feeling that a high-profile leader could protect the nascent corporation. Dyson was the apparent choice.

"It was pretty obvious," she says, "and I said yes."

To plenty of people, the pick made perfect sense. "She was a good choice because she had credibility in a traditional industry world, but also in a nontraditional Internet world," says Becky Burr, an attorney who until September was the ICANN point person at the Commerce Department. But as it turned out, appointing a public figure as chair probably did more to intensify the board's PR problems than to solve them. Without the benefit of Postel's reputation, the nonprofit struggled for credibility; critics attacked at almost every turn. NSI executives challenged the group's legitimacy, insisting that the Commerce Department hadn't really handed its authority over to ICANN, and even went as far as to provide financial support to some of the corporation's most vociferous critics.

Dyson's persona would also make things more difficult. As a businessperson, she has always been a maverick, working on her own for most of her career or managing a small business. Her company, EDventure Holdings, which publishes Release 1.0, is a seven-person operation; as a VC, she has no partners. Used to flying solo, Dyson is unquestionably, sometimes stridently, true to her convictions. Some critics suggest she also has trouble sharing the spotlight. "It's not very difficult to understand Esther's activities when you realize she needs to be visible," says one longtime colleague.

__"Democracy," says Magaziner, "always seems less efficient in the short run." The net result: ICANN still lacks a final plan for selecting half its board. __

In her life as a pundit, Dyson is paid to give frank assessments - not to be diplomatic. Possessed of a quick tongue, she always has a one-liner ready. In the context of bureaucracy, her zingers often provide comic relief, but they can also carry an "I'm smarter than you are" sting. In the midst of deliberating the election process in Cairo, one ICANN gadfly stepped up to say he'd support a delay to get everything done right. Dyson's response: "Thank you - we thought you just wanted us out of here." Around the room, the remark brought tepid laughter - and a lot of eye rolling.

"Esther is sometimes a little offhand, and I think that probably has not always served her well," says Vint Cerf, WorldCom senior VP as well as the Net pioneer who codesigned TCP/IP, the suite of communications protocols on which the Internet is based, and the man many ICANN watchers expect to succeed Dyson as chair. "The ad hoc, or offhand, or even flippant remark can lead to dissent or dissension. I think Esther wants to be, and for the most part is, a consensus-building person. But I think her way of getting there is not the way I would choose."

Dyson's colleagues offer high praise for her integrity and commitment to public service. But often her good intentions have proved to be little more than that. One of her first moves as chair, in November 1998, was to try to blunt some of the criticism about the board's secrecy by holding an open forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"The ICANN process must be two-way," Dyson told the crowd. But the meeting degenerated into a series of attacks from audience members, which put other board members on the defensive. "Decision making cannot be done in the full public view," Hans Kraaijenbrink insisted at the time. "The US government does not meet in public - at least the executive branch doesn't. And European cabinet meetings are not made public. Only the results, and the reasons behind the results, are made public."

John Gilmore, who served with Dyson on the EFF board, was active in the Internet Council of Registrars' attempt to create an IANA successor, an effort that was short-circuited by Magaziner's task force. He never felt a need for an ICANN-like body, and remains critical of Dyson's tenure.

"I respect her greatly for going into it," he says, "but ultimately I think she didn't succeed. I mean, she has succeeded in making an organization that has a chance to do good for the world, but it has done a lot of bad in the meantime. It has established precedents and policies and contracts that have perpetuated the evil rather than reforming it." Gilmore points to the continued delay in breaking NSI's monopoly, something he tried to accomplish more than three years ago. (ICANN has deputized more than 100 domain name resellers like Register.com, but they only compete to enter domains into NSI's database. NSI still collects a fee on every commercial domain registered.)

On our last day in Cairo, Dyson and I shared a cab to the airport. The perpetual traveler was headed to Phoenix, by way of London, for the start of PC Forum in nearby Scottsdale. Fresh from the board meeting, she was in a philosophical mood, and she told me that, despite all the criticism, she was glad she had accepted a board seat. Many of the directors, she noted, were representatives of institutions - either commercial enterprises or the academic community. Somebody had to represent the non-institutional perspectives - those of loners like herself. "It's the consumer, it's the individual as opposed to the organization - whether it's small business or venture capital or Eastern Europe. A diversity of views is beneficial," she said. "I represent almost all points of view, with reservations. I'm an American, but I'm probably less American than most. I'm a woman, but I don't 'represent' women. I've probably trod the path toward consensus as well as anyone could, in part because people don't see me as a threat. I'm really not anybody's person."

Whatever limitations Dyson faced as an unelected chair in a bottom-up organization, there were some key moments when her leadership made a clear difference. Thanks to her push for greater openness, for example, all board meetings are now accessible to the public. (Predictably, critics now complain that the board doesn't make real decisions at the meetings; it merely rubber-stamps decisions that are made over, say, dinner.) Dyson was also instrumental in deflecting ICANN's most serious early attacks from NSI.

Because one of ICANN's goals was to bring competition to the registration business, NSI saw it as the enemy. So when ICANN announced in March 1999 that it planned to collect a $1 annual fee for each new domain registered to cover its annual costs (under its charter, ICANN is supposed to rely on the Internet community for funding operations previously supported by US government grants), NSI went on the attack.

NSI executives and their allies characterized the $1 fee as a "tax" imposed without the blessing of taxpayers; their lobbying effort soon attracted the attention of Congress and the traditional antitax forces inside the Beltway, including the lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform and its president, Grover Norquist. "This is an arbitrary cost imposed on a business transaction that is used to fund regulators, administrators, and bureaucrats mostly based in Europe," Norquist complained at a congressional hearing on the issue.

The hearing, held in July 1999 at the instigation of Representative Tom Bliley, a Republican from Virginia (where NSI is based), set a high-water mark for ICANN criticism, starting with its portentous title, "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" Dyson, ICANN interim CEO Mike Roberts, and the Commerce Department's Becky Burr, testified alongside a slew of other witnesses, including Norquist and NSI CEO Jim Rutt.

Even before the hearing began, ICANN had insulated itself against Bliley's biggest complaint - about the "tax" - by agreeing to suspend the $1 fee. But that wasn't good enough. Bliley had already sent a pointed letter to ICANN and the Commerce Department, in which he asked for details on a number of decisions the nonprofit had made, and complained about the "troubling developments" in the transition from IANA to ICANN. Ultimately, though, what was to have been an ICANN roast turned out to be an embarrassment for Rutt.

__In her life as a pundit, Dyson is paid to give frank assessments - not to be diplomatic. But zingers don't always work in a bureaucracy. __

In previous months, NSI had questioned ICANN's legitimacy by suggesting that the Commerce Department had yet to execute a "final agreement" to transfer domain responsibilities to the new corporation. Without that final agreement, NSI claimed, it couldn't enter into a contract with ICANN. But the Commerce Department insisted - in the congressional hearing - that the agreement was final, leaving Rutt with egg on his face. NSI's hopes for a reconsideration of ICANN's mandate melted away.

Dyson, for her part, performed admirably - answering even the dumbest questions with aplomb and skipping the witty comebacks. She even indulged in flattery. Near the end of her appearance, she told the panel, "We are listening very carefully to your comments here." Ultimately, the committee resolved to do nothing.

The hearing will go down as a minor victory for ICANN - but without the $1 fee, board members are still wondering how the corporation will cover its budget. (ICANN's major costs include salaries for its 10-person staff, technical fees, and expenses for its quarterly meetings. The directors are volunteers.) For now, ICANN remains reliant on grants from major corporations like IBM and WorldCom to stay afloat until it can establish a permanent revenue source. "We are like Blanche DuBois," jokes board member Jonathan Cohen. "Dependent on the kindness of strangers."

ICANN's long-term solution to the revenue problem involves levying fees on the registries themselves, including the country-code administrators and the managers of any new top-level domains it approves. (The corporation has already announced it will collect a nonrefundable deposit of $50,000 from each organization that seeks approval of a new TLD.) But until those TLDs are established, ICANN will be left to beg.

At the Yokohama board meeting, almost a year after the congressional hearing, it was clear that ICANN's performance in Washington had marked the beginning of some positive changes. NSI, having hired IBM's Roger Cochetti as its public policy strategist earlier in the year, had shifted its strategy from confrontation to accommodation. And Congress, its attention diverted by its own elections, had lost its taste for ICANN controversy. "We don't expect any problems on the Hill this session," one ICANN insider told me.

In stark contrast to the bombshell CDT report, a highly anticipated GAO report examining the legality of the Commerce Department's handoff to ICANN landed like a feather a few days before Yokohama. The report concluded that the Commerce Department's procedures had been perfectly legitimate. Dyson was quick to trumpet this result, telling reporters, "It's nice to see some independent, authoritative validation of ICANN's sound legal footing."

But new voices questioning the corporation's legitimacy continue to emerge. In July, People for Internet Responsibility, a self-styled advocacy group founded by a pair of veteran computer scientists, issued a statement calling for the replacement of ICANN with a "new, more formally structured, not-for-profit, internationally based organization." (Exactly how much this group would differ from ICANN was left open to debate.) Governments, the PFIR statement argued, needed to assume a more formal role in the process to prevent nations from making unilateral changes in Net policy.

When Dyson departs, she'll leave the board to deal with a controversy over domain dispute resolution, which appears ready to boil over. The ICANN rules - designed to provide a fast, cheap alternative to court battles - require the use of an arbitrator from an ICANN-approved list by any trademark owner looking to wrest a domain name from its registered owner. Under the rules, plaintiffs trying to claim a domain have to demonstrate that it is identical or confusingly similar to an existing trademark (J. Crew, for example, recently waged a battle over www.crew.com); that the domain holder has no legitimate interest in the domain; and that the domain was registered and used in bad faith. But plaintiffs get to select the arbitrator, and they're choosing well - so far, more than 75 percent of decisions have gone their way. Although anyone dissatisfied with an arbitration outcome can turn to the courts, critics see these numbers as a clear sign that the process favors corporate interests over individuals.

If this seems like an ideological problem, a representative of the national governments on hand at the Yokohama meetings warned the ICANN board that granting too much control to the business community would have repercussions. Paul Twomey, the chair of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee, suggested that if member governments believe ICANN is becoming simply a "fee for service" organization for the companies that contributed to its operations fund, then there's no guarantee these governments will continue to endorse ICANN's limited sovereignty over the Net. Without that support, ICANN would be rendered powerless.

Leaning too far the other way, though, could bring other problems. David Post, who helped launch ICANNWatch, says pushing ICANN's mandate into, say, consumer protection could make the corporation an even bigger target for regulators. Already would-be censors are suggesting that ICANN create a .xxx TLD as a way to segregate porn.

Ironically, Dyson's departure from ICANN may actually temper the most extreme expectations and help the corporation survive. Should Cerf succeed her, as expected, he will bring his own high profile - but like Postel, he made his reputation as an engineer, not a pundit and civil libertarian. And like Postel, Cerf favors the engineers' traditional approach to Net management, which may reinforce the notion that ICANN is merely a technical body. "I have a fiduciary responsibility to ICANN, to keep it from being overloaded with expectations and aspirations," Cerf said last July. "What will not contribute to Internet stability is an explosion of scope of what ICANN tries to do."

Then again, perhaps the most important thing for the next ICANN chair to be is a more instinctive leader. Jonathan Cohen suggests that Dyson has been no more or less of a leader than the rest of the board. "Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure," he says. "It's good if there's a strong natural leader in that kind of situation, but you're dealing with a group of individuals who are very bright, have had a great deal of success, and are used to leading themselves."

__A year after the hearings, NSI was playing nice, and Congress now had bigger things to worry about. But what about the elections? __

Dyson throws her arms up in response to criticism of her ability to lead. "Would I have done the right thing if I could? And if I could, would the board have let me?" she asks, contemplating, among other things, the board's early resistance to openness. Her answer: Maybe. "I think in retrospect it's clear that I should have been more forceful," she says. "But had I been more forceful the board might have rejected me entirely."

In hindsight, however, Dyson thinks that a willingness to risk such a rejection could have headed off the siege mentality that influenced the board's reaction to later complaints about its election plans. "Had we done that right in the beginning, I think everything would have been easier. It escalated, because it made us respond in a hostile way to criticism, and it got more virulent."

Several months later, when asked for an advance review of her tenure, she replied, "Was it impossible to do perfectly? Yes! And I wish good luck to my successor. Was it something worth doing imperfectly? Yes!"

As early as last March, after the Cairo meetings, Dyson was looking forward to putting ICANN behind her, and returning to a world where the market is the ultimate judge. "I'd rather talk about sovereignty than negotiate it, if you know what I mean," she said, punctuating the remark with an enigmatic smile - the same smile she would flash a few months later, in Japan, while reciting Eliot. And then Esther Dyson boarded a flight bound for Heathrow Airport, curled into a window seat in business class, pulled out her laptop, and dove into her email. On a 767 holding 180 people, the temporary politician was ready to fly as a solo pundit once again.